The Book of My Enemy has been remaindered – Clive James

The book of my enemy has been remaindered And I am pleased. In vast quantities it has been remaindered Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized And sits in piles in a police warehouse, My enemy’s much-prized effort sits in piles In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs. Great, square stacks of [...]

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Zennor in Darkness – Helen Dunmore

I’ve read a number of Helen Dunmore’s works.   I liked Your Blue Eyed Boy and With Your Crooked Heart, I didn’t enjoy the short story collection Love of Fat Men at all and I thought The Siege was brilliant  in depicting the events of war on the civilian population during the siege of Stalingrad.  Perversely so successful was The Siege [...]

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Bookshelves #3: 29.01.12 A busy day ahead

No prizes for guessing how my hours will be spent this Sunday …..  Should I stack them colour-coded, by interest, alphabetical? Decisions, decisions … what a lovely dilemma. New shelves should have new books, shouldn’t they?  Have lots of vouchers actually … Does trading them in count as breaking a book-buying ban? It does?  So be it [...]

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Murder at Mansfield Park – Lynn Shepherd

It doesn’t happen very often that a TV drama erases any interest I have in a classic novel but ITV’s 2007 adaptation of Mansfield Park did.   Being a completist with ambitions of reading all of Jane Austen’s novels, of course, I thawed and last year  listened to an unabridged audio.  Well, what a surprise, the book was nowhere near as awful [...]

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Oscar and Lucinda – Peter Carey

Winner 1988 Booker Prize and 1989 Miles Franklin Prize. It’s funny isn’t it how sometimes a novel simply does not call out to be read. All I knew about Oscar and Lucinda, apart from its prize winning credentials, was that it was the story of two gamblers. Not for me, even if it was written [...]

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Bookshelves #2

Just popping in to say the new shelves are here and that I’m busy building my library. Now, if someone can tell me how to make a time-lapse video like this one, I may be able to share the experience at a later date.

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Thyme Running Out – Panama Oxridge

One of the most anticipated releases for me in 2011 was a children’s book – the 4-year long awaited sequel to The Thief of Time, which was released in September and then sat in the TBR until such time as I could once again lose myself in time-travel, time curves and loops without distractions of any [...]

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Book Shelves #1: 15.01.2012 Recorded for Posterity

So when I say that I have 2000+ books and no shelves, you realise that I’m exaggerating, don’t you?  Relatively speaking, though, it is true.  According to librarything I need the equivalent of 13 large Billy bookcases.  As it is I actually have 4 makeshift shelves, which house my Folio Society collection and a few well-deserving interlopers [...]

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Bereft – Chris Womersley

Do you know, Quinn, there isn’t even a word for a parent who has lost a child.  Strange, isn’t it?  You would think, after all these centuries of war and disease and trouble, but no, there is a hole in the English language.  It is unspeakable.  Bereft. So speaks a mother dying of  Spanish influenza to [...]

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TBR Double Dare and Book Cull Week One

Biblioklept started a series last week about books in their natural habitats.  I thought I’d do the same – except that the majority of my books are in very unnatural habitats.  Boxes, carrier bags, underbed storage.  I had a look around and decided it really is time to build a library and that there is no way I [...]

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